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25 Years Of Local H
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| | 12 Angry Months. After the sprawl of Whatever Happened To PJ Soles, we tighten up and pull in the focus, which was no easy feat considering this record was made with five different engineers in 3 different studios with no real producer to oversee the sessions. Chalk it up to some valiant mixing by Micah Wilshire, an excellent mastering job by Mark Chalecki, and a rock solid concept to keep it all together. After a particularly hard breakup during the release of PJ Soles, Scott hatched a plan to make a breakup record to match the acidic anger of records like Dylan's Blood On The Tracks and Marvin Gaye's divorce record Here, My Dear. And that mission is nearly accomplished on the first track alone: The One With Kid. If not our best, at least in our top five. Kid starts off like a typical forlorn, sad sack breakup song before the second half twists around and snaps your head off with pettiness and venom. The performance is truly vicious and Brian's drums are phenomenal. Add to that, lyrics about stolen Kyuss records that provide the proper dose of humor. The song title itself is a reference to The Pretenders. You'd be forgiven for thinking the rest of the record is superfluous. But coming in hot, Michelle (Again) and BMW Man inject a sense of fun and levity that seemed lost on everyone who criticized the record for being a one-note affair. Sure things get dark again after that with White Belt Boys, which actually is a bit of a one-noter, but still manages to mix Prince's Sign O Times, Beyonce's Naughty Girl, Fleetwood Mac's The Chain, and Shout At The Devil by the Crue into a steamy cauldron of piss. Immediately after that, Summer Of Boats lets a little light in with some truly gentle lyrics and a bit of balladry. That doesn't last long, though. Taxi-Cabs is like Looking For Mr. Good Bar on Clark Street and contains some of Scott's favorite lyrics: Taxi cabs are sharks of streets with fins of fire, they troll for fares. The reference to drug-covered Harry Nilsson records in that song give way to another Nilsson reference with Jesus Christ! Did You See The SIZE Of That Sperm Whale - The records nastiest song and a tip of the hat to Jesus Christ You're Tall. Lots of music references on this album. Simple Pleas keeps it civil with some Faces offkey chorusing, before soaring into a gospel-tinged second half that tries to come anywhere within spitting distance of The Beautiful Ones. Those are fake names for the back-up singers, btw - it's all Scott. Machine Shed Wrestling mixes a clumsy metaphor for masturbation with late '70s Stones and To Bring You My Love era PJ Harvey. Blur gives us one last shot of ugly before the record settles down and gets all Zen with Hand To Mouth, our best Echo & The Bunnymen imitation. It's not all so angry, is it? It's definitely one our strongest conceptual records and the punch that people found missing on PJ Soles is returned, albeit with some of that record's handcrafted edges sanded off. Wilshire's mix spiffies up the room, even employing some '90s methods not heard since Tom Lord-Alge's work on As Good As Dead. But, he holds back from giving it that anonymous, factory-ready sheen. A real and honest record for the lovelorn that spins the micro into the macro. Our next album would take that formula and totally reverse it.. |
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